Our favorite reporter on the 10th anniversary of the 2004 tsunami

Michael Bachelard’s article came out in The Age on the 20^th. He had warned me that he didn’t have enough space to include palm oil destruction, the many EDFF blunders or the AAA/Keumang disappearing $6.7 million. “In the midst of the tsunami reconstruction stuff,” he wrote, “it was too hard to explain why a highland cocoa plantation was relevant.”

Well, okay.  I guess.

He did express sadness that he couldn’t include it but reminded me that the story was “full of other things: empty housing and personal stories of the wave, misgovernance, sharia law, environmental doom and electoral misbehavior.”   So that’s good.  He also said that our “ideas and help were invaluable in shaping the piece as something other than just a tsunami reconstruction.”

So I’ll forgive him.

And share his article with you.  

I do have to say, however, that he put most of the blame at the feet at one or another Indonesian or Acehnese entity (government, GAM, BRR, etc) and pretty much gave a hall pass to the international NGOs who lined their pockets with a significant portion of the reconstruction in the name of consultants, salaries and “administrative fees.”

But we still love him, and he will still keep an eye on Aceh. 

[I’ve inserted a few comments, in blue.]

Aceh: after the wave

December 20, 2014

--Michael Bachelard

http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/aceh-after-the-wave-20141219-11w71n.html

 

Alongside the loss of lives, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami wiped out a long-time separatist conflict in Aceh. Ten years on, Michael Bachelard finds renewed tensions in the Indonesian province.

A diorama recreates the horror of 2004 at Aceh's Tsunami museum. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

First, the earthquake struck. Roads buckled and houses cracked. Two explosions rent the air and thousands of voices cried out in fear. Then the waves swelled up from the sea and scoured Aceh's west coast with water, bringing debris and death.

But it's not the memory of noise that keeps fisherman Andi Yusuf awake at night when he thinks of the tsunami 10 years ago - it's the silence that followed.

Yusuf was asleep when the earth started shaking at 7.59am on Sunday, December 26, 2004. Informed by half-remembered family lore about earthquakes and killer waves, this fisherman from Aceh's coastal village of Calang fled to higher ground with his wife, baby and young child. Clinging with grim determination to a hillside durian tree, his wife fainting from shock, Yusuf watched as some of his neighbours ran away from the beach while others ran towards it, looking for open ground. The tsunami's towering, 30-metre second wave consumed them all, coming or going.

A hilltop settlement of recently built houses in Lhok Kruet is mostly abandoned, as they have no running water. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

"Before the water came, I heard people panicking, shouting, screaming. They looked like chickens," Yusuf recalls, his fisherman's eyes, which are habituated to the horizon, turning inwards and to the past. "I saw the roof of the school flying into the air, big timber floating. But after the second wave, the big one, I heard nothing. Not a single voice. Silence."

Into this silence, an estimated 167,000 voices fell in Aceh alone. Hearing Yusuf speak, it's amazing not that so many died, but that any survived. He saved his wife and children, but lost perhaps 50 members of his extended family.

In Sri Lanka, 35,000 were killed; in India, 18,000. Thailand lost more than 8000 including 24 of the 26 Australians who died. Globally, 230,000 people lost their lives and perhaps 1.7 million were displaced.

Tsunami survivor Andi Yusuf. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

This was a freak geological event: a "mega thrust" earthquake measuring up to 9.3 on the Richter scale that pushed a 1600-kilometre stretch of the Indian Ocean 15 metres higher. The resultant wave - the biggest tsunami in history - reshaped 800 kilometres of the Indonesian province's western coastline, penetrating three to six kilometres inland. More than 120,000 houses were flattened, 500,000 left homeless, the road system obliterated. Administrative data - birth and death records, property ownership details - were destroyed and public servants killed or incapacitated by grief. The rebuilding of western Aceh started from scratch.

But the tsunami was not just a physical event, it was also a profound political event - the single most important spur to ending a 30-year civil war between the Indonesian government and the separatist Free Aceh Movement (known as GAM for its Indonesian initials).

It's easy, in the tsunami's awesome wake, to diminish the conflict that predated it. But ordinary people do not forget the separatist era's disappearances, the random killings, the relatives dead in the street. Calang villager Rosmalia remembers constant fear. "You heard shootings in the nearby town. You heard stories that people were killed by the security apparatus - shot from head to toe by bullets so that their body just split in half," she says.

This mosque, 20 kilometres from Aceh’s capital Banda Aceh, was the only building left in the area 

after the tsunami. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

"In 2004, after 30 years of conflict, there was no development in Aceh: schools were being burned down, the social fabric was in pieces," says Heru Prasetyo, the former deputy head of the Indonesian tsunami reconstruction authority. "The only thing that was safe was the forest, because the rebels lived there and nobody was brave enough to go in and cut down trees."

In his view, nature did Aceh a favour. "Aceh was like a person who was almost dead from a heart attack. The tsunami was a jolt that brought it back to life."

Asked about Prasetyo's analogy, Rosmalia barely pauses before agreeing: "The trauma of the conflict was worse than the tsunami."

Lhok Nga school students practice a tsunami drill. Photo: Ulet Ifansasti

The size of the disaster was incomprehensible, the global response unprecedented. A 2008 Brookings Institution paper estimated the total damage to Aceh at $US4.45 billion. In response, the international community pledged $US7.7 billion. Two-thirds of that was spent in just three years by 463 organisations across 2200 projects. Remote Meulaboh had, at one point, 20 surgeons in field hospitals.

The aid was "like a second tsunami", says Prasetyo. "Catholic relief worked with Muslim aid and non-government organisations (NGOs) from Israel were working in the land of sharia, and working effectively. It was like the John Lennon song Imagine: no religion, no country. It was so powerful."

Huge international organisations, including the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations Development Programme and Australia's AusAID, co-operated with a quickly formed Indonesian agency, the Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency, under a straight-talking former minister, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto.

Australia contributed $600 million - more than half of it donated by the public. Our money trained people and built capacity in education and health, livelihoods, infrastructure and the public service.

Mangkusubroto's reconstruction authority stands as a "remarkable success", according to Australian National University academic Ed Aspinall. "It's a landmark in Indonesia's modern political economy about how to run a large development or construction endeavour in a way that significantly avoids or minimises corruption."

But it was never going to be perfect. The first priority was housing: 140,000 houses were eventually required, and agencies were under pressure to spend their funds quickly to satisfy donors and watchful journalists.

In the northern suburbs of Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, lies a beachside community called Lhok Nga. Here, the mountains funneled the wave into a torrent which wiped away everything but the mosque. Not long after, though, it had regrown like a simulacrum of a 1950s suburb: identical, box-like, 36-square-metre rendered concrete houses standing in symmetrical rows. Many now stand empty.

"They are empty because for most of them only the children are left: the parents are dead. They were only small [when the wave hit], so they live with extended family," says Umran Amril, smoking a quiet afternoon cigarette in a Lhok Nga cafe. Some are rented out, but the Acehnese attachment to land means few want to sell: "We wanted it rebuilt because the land belongs to our great-grandparents," Amril says. "We won't sell for same reason."

It's a similar story all down the tsunami-devastated western coast. In Lhok Kruet, about 30 minutes from hard-hit Calang, Canadian money built a settlement of 250 houses atop a hill, at the request of local fishermen. They are certainly high enough to survive any future tsunami, but only 28 are now occupied. The fishermen changed their minds when they realised there was no running water and, until recently, no electricity.

In Calang, itself, Yusuf takes shelter from the heat of the day in a rubbish-strewn village harbour. He's unwinding old nylon ropes, preserving the individual strings to re-weave into nets. Nearby is a concrete pier, an office building, a small market area and a petrol station, all built (and decorated with maritime themes) by international donors. All now are abandoned.

The pier, Yusuf says, splashes back waves which swamp their boats, so locals built a replacement from wood. The market has none of the equipment they need and there's no toilet or other facilities in the office building, so people won't work there. Salt, wind and rain are now picking these buildings apart as surely as Yusuf dismembers old ropes. Two large boats are keeled over in the shallows and also decaying. They were donated but never used - too light, too dangerous, he says.

"There was a lot of assistance but they came rushing to help; they didn't ask what we need." He also has a more fundamental complaint, this one against the local government authorities. He's one of 25 local victims who missed out on the new houses, while some "who are not native to this area - civil servants from [East coast province] Bireuën - got them". This blatant misallocation "is very much about corruption", he says.

Corruption is baked into politics in Indonesia, and Aceh probably never stood a chance of avoiding it.

After the wave, peace came surprisingly quickly. An informal, though shaky ceasefire in the last days of 2004 was followed by talks endorsed by then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who had only been in office for two months when the tsunami hit. He had little choice: donors, aid agencies and journalists were prising open a previously airtight state in their rush to oversee the recovery. Continuing a war, or even the prevailing state of martial law, was untenable, though hard-liners on both sides tried. In August, 2005, in Helsinki, Finland, the two sides ended 30 years of brutality by signing a Memorandum of Understanding. Suddenly, about 30,000 armed and largely uneducated former separatist rebels were demobbed. Hardened by combat and accustomed to collecting money using extortion justified locally as "war taxes", many found it hard to mend their ways. [especially when they were promised livelihoods and compensation in exchange for agreeing to the cease-fire and to this day have never been compensated.]

The rampant inflation that came with an influx of foreign funds to Aceh was accelerated by these former GAM rebels - now rebadged as the Aceh Transitional Committee, or KPA - "taxing" the reconstruction.

Even USAID's landmark project, a silk-smooth western highway, was subject to "epic blackmail", one former consultant recalls, to the extent that the project director publicly threatened to cancel it.

"The extortion attempts on NGO projects in Aceh followed a familiar pattern," wrote aid worker Bobby Anderson in 2013. "Persons claiming KPA affiliation would make demands to field staff for protection fees or material, often vehicles . . .  The threats often implied the arson of vehicles and the killing of staff. Numerous projects were shut down due to this." [I have to say that in all that time, during those first months and years after the tsunami, JMD never had a problem, and we worked in the most remote and conflict-affected areas of the province.  I’m not saying that these events did not happen, but I think there was, at times, a specific hostility towards large and fairly presumptuous NGOS who as the article mentions did not understand the context in which they were operating, nor did they care.]

Come election time, though, the former rebels, with their history of resistance and bullish sub-national pride, won overwhelming support. Former combatant Irwandi Yusuf became Aceh's governor in 2006. More educated than most of his compadres, he surprised observers and won wide international support as a pro-environment leader wanting to build an outward-looking economy by taking advantage of global carbon funding to preserve the province's forests. Aceh is the last place on earth where tigers, orangutans, elephants and rhinos still live together.

After a bitter internal GAM power struggle, though, Irwandi lost the governorship at the 2012 election to an old-generation combatant, Partei Aceh's Zaini Abdullah. Thirteen people were murdered during the campaign.  [And with the palm oil extraction interests winning over even large donors like USAID, the rhinos, elephants and tigers are not far behind.]

To this day, government loyalists in Aceh are accused of standover tactics, extortion and corruption, particularly involving construction projects. Aid worker and activist Muslahuddin Daud sees the ex-combatants as trying to preserve the "war psychology" that got them into power: "If you build a house, they'll say, 'The sand should be from me, or we'll blow up your car,' " he says. [I don’t know if it’s so much a “war psychology” as an “I need to eat” psychology.  These combatants saw a fraction of their numbers receive government positions and large pensions—and those same leaders then turned their backs on them.  In some ways they believe themselves to be the only legitimate defenders of the province left standing, and they are repaid with poverty and isolation.]

Since Abdullah's election, almost all international NGOs have left. Some, no doubt, believe Aceh no longer needs their help. The Indonesian government's own reconstruction authority was disbanded in 2009, and under a "special autonomy" arrangement, Aceh qualifies for generous central government funding, but former governor Irwandi told Good Weekend that they'd also been put off by Abdullah's decision to "win the 2012 election by force". [for some reason both governors have sent back the funding each month.  It boggles the mind.] And the forests - preserved for so many years as redoubts of the rebels - are now under threat from a proposed spatial plan that would allow massive industrial development.  [They became threatened as soon as the peace accord was signed in 2005 and the government welcomed international palm oil and mining cartels in to destroy the protected forest and use no discretion in obliterating the rest of it. Protection laws are not good if no one reinforces them.  The spatial plan is just closing the barn door after the horse has left.]

The worst outcome, Muslahuddin says, has been the government's administrative failures. Nine years after the peace deal was signed, negotiators for the Aceh and central governments have still not agreed on implementing laws for power sharing, oil and gas revenue and land ownership. This leads, for foreign investors in the oil-rich province, to persistent uncertainty and, for some Acehnese nationalists, to the belief that Jakarta is denying them fulfillment of their rights. "If [the full Helsinki agreement] is not granted, of course we will take up arms again," a senior Partei Aceh election committee member told Good Weekend. "We could declare war any time. We could declare war tomorrow."

[And just what have I been saying for a year?  Hah?  But does anyone listen to me??]

Aceh's use of Islamic sharia law in the criminal code likewise deters foreigners. It was introduced by Jakarta in 2001 to try to buy the support of Aceh's devout religious leaders, but it only came to international prominence after the tsunami. According to the director of the Jakarta-based Institute of Policy Analysis of Conflict, Sidney Jones, among the foreign organisations that flooded into the province were Islamic hardline lobby groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. Until their arrival, Aceh - long known as the "verandah of Mecca" - was devout but also "very tolerant". Hardline Islamists succeeded recently in adding to long-standing bans on gambling, drinking and unmarried young people consorting. Now adultery and homosexuality are also criminal offences, subjecting to 100 lashes men who have anal sex with each other, and women who "rub together body parts for stimulation". [It is interesting, then, that World Vision operates so freely in the province, being an evangelical Christian organization—or do they not know that in Aceh?]

A censorious approach to opposition also prevails. "Any organisation which criticises the government is said to be anti Islamic sharia," says Roslina Rasyid, the leader of a network of local NGOs in the north-eastern Aceh city of Lhokseumawe. People are deterred from raising examples of abuses, she says.

"It's a real problem for Aceh now, and long-term, they have to deal with it if they want foreign investment and tourism," says Sidney Jones.

Aceh desperately needs economic growth. About 18 per cent of the population is still in poverty and new political schisms, fuelled by poverty and thwarted hopes, are emerging among former combatants. "You wouldn't want to predict a regression to any full-scale separatist conflict, but on the other hand, you would have hoped that 10 years after the peace deal you'd have seen a stronger fading of that sense of resilient, resistant Aceh identity," the ANU's Aspinall says. "It bubbles away, but it's much closer to the surface than you'd expect."

At Lhok Nga primary school in Banda Aceh's suburbs, where the wave killed all but 90 of its 400 students, the recovery is obvious in the numbers: 435 children are enrolled this year.

Shifa Teskia's father died in the wave. Now 12, she says she wants to be a doctor. For today, she and her classmates are performing one of their regular tsunami drills - initiated by World Vision - and Shifa wears a sash proclaiming her a dokter kecil (small doctor). She's earnestly dabbing a pretend wound of pretend patient Mohammad Azri, 10, who in real life was orphaned as a baby by the wave.

Their teacher, Laili Hafna, saved her own four children a decade ago by rushing to the local mosque. Her sister, husband and baby all perished. As she looked out at the devastation that day, Hafna says she truly believed she was watching the world end: "I never thought I would be here today, that there would be life after all."

Like many, though, Hafna now wonders if the tsunami, a bit like Noah's flood in the Bible, was Allah's way of saving them from what went before. "During the combat, we always lived in fear," she recalls. "Life was very difficult ... we thank Allah that we can have this life now, and that it's a different life."

Surely, though, it was a brutal price to pay?

"That is His mystery," she replies with a smile.

The Indonesian elections: a little something for everyone

With the legislative elections only a day away I wanted to reprint what our new journalist friend Michael Bachelard wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald last week, based in part on his trip to Aceh, and assisted by—you guessed it—the staff of JMD.  Remember how a few months back I was posting about trying to find a journalist to do a “Where is Aceh 10 Years After the Tsunami” documentary, hopefully focusing on Aceh Timur, our cocoa farmers, and the fight to stop deforestation and big palm oil?  Well, I think Michael is going to do it.  He had a good if exhausting trip, saw lost of destruction he needed to see (but was sorry he had to) and spoke with politicians, our farmers and community members, and some ex-combatants and GAM leaders.  His focus this trip was on the elections, and I’m reprinting his article here (may he and the SMH forgive me for copyright infringement):

Indonesians vote one for incongruity

   ---Nowhere is the adage of politics makes strange bedfellows more apt

by Michael Bachelard, April 5, 2014

Running for office: the candidates. Photo: Fairfax Graphics

One-time nude model, polygamist and horror movie actress turned parliamentary candidate Angel Lelga smiles fetchingly for the camera as a succession of poor women move in to be photographed in her orbit.

They are standing on the verandah of a village house in Central Java, and Angel's immaculate make-up, pink Chanel slip-ons and high-fashion headscarf are incongruous among the chickens and dust of the rice belt.

Indonesia's parliamentary election is in full swing before the vote next Wednesday and campaign season makes for some odd sights. But the incongruities in Angel's candidacy do not end there - this celebrity entertainer with a past that is anything but orthodox is running for a conservative Muslim political party.

If elections, particularly those for a country's parliament, are a window to a nation's soul, there are some candidates who present a particularly complex and fascinating picture of the modern Indonesia.

Angel illustrates the mind-bending interface between religion, sex, morality and politics. She is running for the United Development Party (PPP), the oldest Islamic party in the country.

Its leader, religious affairs minister Suryadharma Ali, sits squarely on the right of national politics by pushing for Muslim morality to be embedded in law. In the past two years his party has suggested that alcohol be banned and that "skirts worn above the knee" be judged pornographic and thus illegal.

Yet it was Suryadharma himself who recruited Angel, whose naked torso graces an album cover by rock band Slank; who has acted in three lingerie-horror movies including The Moans of the Virgin Ghost with an American porn star; who converted from Catholicism to Islam just to become the fourth wife of a polygamous pop singer; and whose only previous political activism was chatting with the minister at parties.

Angel is one of a surprising large cohort of what the Indonesian blogosphere has derisively dubbed "caleg cantik", or beautiful candidates, recruited by a sclerotic party system for their vote-catching sex appeal. There are 50 or more running, prompting one commentator to bemoan a "bimbo time bomb" in the national parliament. In an interview as we bump along the roads of the town of Klaten, Angel asks only that we view her colourful past as part of her formation as a person.

She is in politics, she says, to reach out to more people, to have a useful life, to build villages. Why else would she run in what in Australian parlance we'd call a marginal, if not unwinnable, seat for PPP?

"If it is a difficult election to win, people will respect me more," she says.

But the contradictions embedded in her candidacy are obvious. She has begun wearing the headscarf but, asked if she would vote for her boss' mini-skirt ban, she equivocates.

"I don't want to oppose the views of Suryadarma Ali, but … we shouldn't be that narrow-minded."

On her Christian past, she insists it should not matter to Muslim voters "because religion should be personal". But she is running for a party whose reason for being is to put the religion into public policy. And in her spiel to villagers, she trumpets: "Do you want a non-Muslim running the country?"

Indonesia's sexual politics, though, are nothing if not complex. The message of political Islam may be straitlaced but a number of its politicians have been the "stars" of secret sex videos without apparent harm to their careers. Secret marriages, premarital sex and prostitution are widespread and tolerated.

Viewed in this light, Angel's many contradictions may be little more confounding than Indonesia itself.

Prita Mulyasari is also a celebrity candidate but her fame comes from social, not mass, media. A middle-class mother of three from Jakarta's outer suburbs, she was jailed in 2008 because she dared complain about her treatment in a hospital where her mumps were misdiagnosed as dengue fever.

After the hospital refused to admit its error or hand over her medical records, Prita's complaint via email went viral on social media. The symptoms of a sick health system were too familiar to many Indonesians.

The hospital's response was to sue for defamation. Police became involved and, on a visit to the prosecutor, Prita was informed that under Indonesia's electronic communications law she faced up to six years in jail, meaning she must be held in custody during the investigation.

Prita was whisked away immediately and put in a four metre square cell with 12 others including a murderer, a drug addict and a car thief. She spent a week in "quarantine", sleeping in shifts and unable to contact her family.

"I was shocked,'' she says. ''I never thought it would happen. I had done no preparation. My eldest child was two years old and the youngest eight months, and I was still breast feeding the baby … they would not even let me say goodbye to my kids.''

In total she was in jail for 22 days.

A likely explanation is that the hospital paid police and prosecutors in Indonesia's thoroughly corrupt legal system to throw the book at her. Judges are likewise able to be bought and Prita lost the case at the first hearing and was fined 200 million rupiah ($20,000).

"I felt I was facing giants," Prita says. "These people with unlimited money … they control the law."

In Prita's corner, though, was another feature of modern Indonesia - the power of social media. Jakartans tweet more than anybody else in the world, and Indonesia has the fourth largest Facebook population on the planet.

An appeal, "Coins for Prita", placed collection boxes around the country. So many coins were donated that she raised 800 million rupiah ($80,000). For four years she fought the hospital through various courts until a judicial review in 2012 found in her favour.

Megawati Sukarnoputri, chief of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), also lent her support, and now Prita is seeking election in the Banten III district outside Jakarta. Her hope is that, in parliament, she could see improvements in the defamation law, the health system, the legal system and prisons.

Nearly 2000 kilometres from Jakarta, Fadlon is a candidate in an electoral race that makes lesser men quail, and shows how politically pragmatic even former deadly enemies can be when resource exploitation is on the table.

Until 10 years ago, the GAM rebels of Aceh, Indonesia's westernmost province, waged a fierce war for independence. Fadlon, a former local commander who goes by just one name, is now seeking a provincial seat for Partai Aceh, the political party that emerged from GAM.

As a local party, Partai Aceh cannot contest seats in the national parliament, so since the 2009 election it has teamed up with a national party. This year, though, Fadlon's party has made the strangest possible choice of political partner - its one-time deadly enemy, former Indonesian general and Suharto son-in-law Prabowo Subianto.

According to University of California historian Geoffrey Robinson, Prabowo's command of reserve forces in the 1990s "coincided with the onset of the worst violence" in Aceh.

Now the former general is a credible candidate for the Indonesian presidency, and his party, Gerindra, desperately needs Acehnese votes. Last month, a former GAM leader, Aceh's deputy governor Muzakkir Manaf, made an agreement with Prabowo that some call a coalition, and he joined Gerindra's advisory board. He is telling Acehnese people to vote for Gerindra in parliament, and for Prabowo as president. Prabowo, in turn, apologised for army misbehaviour during the conflict.

But the tie-up - described by some as "like oil and water" - will sorely test even the most loyal Partai Aceh supporters in an electorate that is already tense after two candidates and several civilians have been killed in political violence in past weeks. Fadlon's uncle was shot dead by the army in the 1990s but, despite the qualms of his mother, he says he supports the Prabowo deal.

"We treated him as an enemy during the conflict but now we have a peace deal [with Jakarta signed in 2005], and he says he's committed to help build Aceh," Fadlon says. "I personally trust the elite of GAM on this."

What Prabowo has promised is a secret, but Partai Aceh wants what it has always wanted - Jakarta's hands off - particularly regarding the exploitation of its natural resources. Some suggest this is what Prabowo has offered.

"We want development, but we don't what to be dictated to by Jakarta," Fadlon says. "We were told by our elite that he is committed to this agreement."

Ordinary Partai Aceh supporters, though, find it hard to swallow. Jafaruddin sells fruit in the market in Kuala Simpang in Aceh's far south-east. A former combatant, his brother was one of those who disappeared.

"I would find it difficult personally to vote for [Prabowo] for president because our relatives were slaughtered by him … he was a murderer," Jafarruddin says.

Like Indonesia itself, though, he is complex, and he is inclined by habits of loyalty to do what his old commanders say, even though he believes if they saw him on the street "they would not even give me a cigarette butt".

"Yes, I still follow them," he says, "because that is our party."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/indonesians-vote-one-for-incongruity-20140404-364hx.html#ixzz2yDkU1ebx